One of the main goals for genealogists is finding birth, marriage, and death (BMD) information about their ancestors.

Over the past few decades, thanks to volunteers, librarians and archivists (as well as the largest of them all - FamilySearch), a great number of indexes to birth, marriage, and death collections have been provided for free online. These searchable indexes provide specific BMD information, and sometimes scanned images of the actual birth, marriage, and death certificates themselves. These free online collections have hundreds of millions of records in them in total.​There are a great number of online and offline collections that may include birth, marriage, and death information that are not included in the lists below. For example, newspapers, draft registration files, naturalization records, etc. have BMD info. To find out which types of other records may include BMD information, please see: ​​